All their lives, the prisoners have been chained facing a blank back wall in a shallow cave. They watch dim shadows of people, animals, and clouds passing the mouth of the cave, and they mistake these shadows for reality.
One prisoner escapes his chains, leaves the cave, and wanders amazed through the trees, farms, and cities of the outside world. When he sneaks back into the dark cave to describe to his fellows all that he’s witnessed, they refuse to believe him.
Watching their sunburned escapee friend stumble around in sun-blinded confusion, the prisoners resolve to never try to escape.
This small story forms the core of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It’s a story useful to anyone who teaches critical thinking, because it’s a handy way to explain that reality isn’t always what it seems.
I used to mention the cave in journalism classes when I was trying to explain the need to verify news stories. “As a reporter, you need to know when something looks like what it isn’t,” I told them. “That requires time, effort, and a perpetual refusal to take things at face value.”
“That’s why you go into interviews having done some research. You find out if the person you’re interviewing has a reputation for lying. You interview more than one person. You consult experts on points of dispute.
“You can maybe start thinking a story is true once it’s been verified by two independent sources, but don’t stop at two. Keep looking, and never refuse to change your mind when new evidence contradicts old evidence. Don’t ever mistake what you know for what’s real.”
It’s been a while since I taught journalism, but Plato’s Cave has stuck with me, especially this winter in Sawtooth Valley, where evidence of the outside world comes from an occasional pickup or SUV on the highway, plus aircraft contrails far above our heads, plus the Internet.
In spite of what the Internet tells us, the pickups do not appear to be full of right-wing militia members and they don’t have anti-aircraft guns mounted in their beds. The contrails are too few and too thin to be chem-trails, and the aircraft leaving them don’t look like military transports flying shock troops into cities run by Democrats.
The news stories and commentaries on my computer screen present themselves as reality. They’re not. As a critical thinker, I don’t need Plato to point out that the Internet presents a corrupt and incomplete version of what’s really out there.
That is, if anything is out there.
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I’ve spent the morning reading people who are expecting Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and refuse to give up the reins of power on January 20. Almost all of these people think that he should do this because he’s been cheated out of the presidency by election fraud. They believe that the military is going to back him up. They cite as evidence increased flights of troop-carrying C-130s out of air bases, and the presence of aircraft carriers off our Atlantic coast.
It’s assumed that Trump cannot take these steps without generating armed opposition from Black Lives Matter and Antifa protestors, but it’s also assumed that these groups will all be rounded up and shot shortly after the military takes control. Also, COVID-19 will be revealed as nothing worse than the common cold, and everyone will take off their masks and go back to work. The Dow Jones will take aim at 40,000. Industry will return to the Rust Belt. Women will return to kitchen and nursery.
On some websites, there are calls for traitors to be guillotined, except for journalists, who instead should be stripped naked and staked out in the desert over fire-ant nests. The ingrate justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, along with Attorney General Barr, are to be executed by firing squad.
You get the idea, reading the commentary on far-right websites, that over the next four years, a lot of people will be executed in ways limited only by their executioners’ imaginations. You also get the idea that a lot of people aspire to be executioners.
I wish I was making this up, but I’m not. These are real comments on real websites, and real people are creating them. I think it’s safe to say they’re not critical thinkers. It’s also safe to say their emotional lives are insanely violent and cruel and their confidence is unshakeable.
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If the verification techniques I taught in my journalism classes had been followed by every voter in the country, Donald Trump’s stories wouldn’t have won him election in 2016. He wouldn’t have become president if voters had demanded more than one source for their information, if they had insisted he release his tax returns, or if they had pondered the implications of his legal history.
He wouldn’t have become president if an outright lie had been a deal-breaker for the average voter.
Now, we are asked to believe the story of a stolen election. Election officials, even in Republican states, are saying it didn’t happen. Voting machine experts are saying it didn’t happen. By any journalistic assessment, it’s an outright lie. But it might keep Donald Trump in the White House.
Lies have put all sorts of people in power and kept them there. But the trouble with basing your power on a lie is that it requires more and more energy to maintain as time goes on. The energy that should have gone into, say, coordinating a response to a pandemic goes instead into making sure that people still believe what you’re telling them. Ultimately, nothing becomes as important as ensuring the real world doesn’t impact your thinking or the thinking of your followers.
All that will be required to paralyze these not-so-United States for the next four years is to keep Donald Trump in the Oval Office. There will be no energy left for anything but making up enough elaborate fictions to keep him there.
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Sawtooth Valley is not a cave, but it has a cave’s ability to substitute for the real. We who live here are not chained to rock walls, and we know that the images on our computer screens may or may not be manipulated. We know the words we read on screens may be true, or partly true, or deliberate lies written by evil people, or by good people crazed by lives of disappointment and tragedy. Also, we here in the valley are free to drive over Galena Summit with our critical thinking caps on and do some good old honest fact-checking.
Most of us don’t bother in these pandemic days. We know that fact-checking, for us, would only confirm that one Costco looks like another. Besides, we’ve got a nice wall here and we love it and its ever-changing shadows.
Even the news simply serves to convince us that other walls are worse. It’s a recipe for complacency, which doesn’t chafe like chains do, and is just as effective in keeping us from seeing the world.
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Plato suggested that if you want to escape the cave, you could dedicate yourself to a good, solid, eternal idea, like Truth, or Justice, or even Kindness. These ideas were more real than any faint shadow you could discern as a cave-dweller.
I sided with Plato. I told my journalism students that Truth was to be their highest and best goal, and although they could never completely reach it, there were ways of getting ever closer to it. It was worth going to jail for. It was worth dying for, even if it meant being staked out over a bunch of fire ants somewhere south of Tucson.
“Why can’t you ever reach Truth?” they wanted to know.
“Sometimes your whole story is an artifact of your point of view,” I said. “And deadlines always come before you’re done. Some of your interviewees will have filled you full of happy lies. But the story will go to print with your name on it, and you better have done enough work and been perceptive enough that your readers know you’ve seen through the lies, accounted for any research bias, and admitted that you didn’t have time to nail down everything you needed to. If you haven’t done all that, you need to give up on Truth and become lobbyists.”
It’s telling that none of my journalism students are, as far as I know, journalists. A number of them are lobbyists, however, which makes me think they were really paying attention when I described all the ways journalists could be manipulated.
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Sometime later today the Electoral College is expected to certify that Joe Biden has won the election. I have no idea if it really will do that. There may be enough faithless electors to give the presidency to Trump again, or maybe the military will interrupt the proceedings and announce Trump is president for another four or eight years. Perhaps Trump will declare martial law for a decade. Perhaps Congress will refuse to accept the Electoral College results.
If any of these measures keep Biden out of office, all constitutional restraints on executive authority will be gone.
I know such things can happen, because they’ve happened in other countries, at other times, and the Republican party has convinced me that they won’t let questions of conscience impede their vision of an Ideal Republic, no matter how shabby, avaricious, and ugly that republic ends up being in the flesh.
But I simply don’t know what will happen. I can’t know what will happen and I certainly, at this point, can’t determine what will happen. I no longer can distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t real, especially on the Internet. Uncertainty has become the gray stone wall upon which I watch the news.
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Philosophers have been busy since Plato, and they’ve taken pains to logically undercut a lot of things that he took for granted, like ideas and mathematical axioms and even the natural world. Deconstruction has shown that if you change the context of an idea you can change its meaning to anything—hence nothing—and that with a little tweaking, you can show that mathematical truth and the natural world exist only as artifacts of an oppressive culture. Plato’s bedrock reality, the world of the ideal, is no longer believed to exist.
Plato’s cave has been expanded to include its own outside. You can’t escape it.
Once people learned how to make reality itself into an artifact, there wasn’t much that journalists and scientists and other believers in Truth could point to in its defense. Even if we could have pointed to Truth’s solid service in World War Two and in the civil rights movement, nobody was listening. Truth itself had already gone over to the enemy.
An astronomer friend has notified me that Jupiter and Saturn will appear as a point of light a week from now, on the solstice. They will be 400 million miles apart, of course, but from our perspective they’ll look like they’re almost touching. It’s the best example I can give of our point of view creating the news these days.
The end of this process—and it is a process, one where each step seems inevitable once it’s been taken—is that each of us becomes a world, and what each of us believes is true. That’s not a good outlook for a country that hopes to arrive at a consensus on where to go, what to do, and what the purpose of our nation should be.